The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

project that provides reporting and

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical p ...

capabilities for

rich client In computer networking, a rich client (also called heavy, fat or thick client) is a computer (a "client" in client–server network architecture) that typically provides rich functionality independent of the central server. This kind of computer ...

and

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

s, especially those based on

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

and

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web ser ...

. BIRT is a top-level software project within the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors and an

open source community The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open ...

. The project's stated goals are to address a wide range of reporting needs within a typical application, ranging from operational or enterprise reporting to multi-dimensional online analytical processing (

OLAP Online analytical processing, or OLAP (), is an approach to answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries swiftly in computing. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational databases, repor ...

). Initially, the project has focused on and delivered capabilities that allow application developers to easily design and integrate reports into applications. The project is supported by an active community of users at BIRT Developer Center and developers at the Eclipse.org BIRT Project page. BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the

Eclipse IDE Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It is the second-most-popular IDE for Java development, and, un ...

for creating BIRT Reports, and a runtime component for generating reports that can be deployed to any Java environment. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used standalone to integrate charts into an application. BIRT Report designs are persisted as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

and can access a number of different data sources including JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs, SQL

databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

, Web Services and XML.

History

The BIRT project was first proposed and sponsored by

Actuate Corporation Actuate Corporation is a publicly traded reporting, analytics and customer communications software company based in San Mateo, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. The company’s software is intended for use in the ...

when Actuate joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer on August 24, 2004. The project was subsequently approved and became a top-level project within the Eclipse community on October 6, 2004 The project contributor community includes IBM, and Innovent Solutions. In 2007 IBM's Tivoli Division adopted BIRT as the infrastructure for its Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) product. TCR produces historical reports on Tivoli-managed IT resources and processes. The initial project code base was designed and developed by Actuate beginning in early 2004 and donated to the Eclipse Foundation when the project was approved.

Versions

References

Bibliography

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External links

Eclipse BIRT project home page
{{Eclipse plugins 2005 software Business intelligence software Free reporting software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Eclipse (software) Eclipse technology Eclipse software